Wondering if anyone might have some input regarding the placement of lossless files for playback in terms of hard drives.
 
I occasionally a drop out when playing back lossless files if I multitask.
 
Would lossless files be best placed on the OS hard drive (separate partition)? Or perhaps a nice speedy, separate hard drive/partition? Would any of this even matter?
 
 
My PC connects to my EMU 0404 USB which then connects to desktop speakers and headphone amp. The EMU 0404 USB connects to my PC via a separate add-on USB card (NEC chipset) which holds no other USB devices.
 
I'm trying to figure out what might be considered optimal for PC playback of lossless flac files in general.
 
My PC specs: W7 Pro 32-bit, Quad Core Q9550, 4GB ram.

My data is all stored on a dedicated RAID array. It's pretty cheap, and it means that you never have to worry about conflagurating OS and data.
 
I tend to recommend:
OS Drive (great spot for SSD)
Swap/Temp drive (good spot for that fast HDD you used for OS before going SSD)
Data Mirror (large and in bulk)

Get a second computer that is dedicated to audio playback.  Doesn't need to be a fancy computer with a super fast CPU.  Optimize that computer for audio playback.  Disable any hardware and services that does not contribute to audio playback.  Use that computer for audio playback only and don't do any general web browsing and stuff on it while music is playing.  Use your current desktop computer for regular day to day computer use and not for audio playback.
 
I don't personally follow those rules.  I play audio from my regular day to day desktop PC.  It glitches occasionally due to foreground processing load.  One of these days I'll decide to go with a dedicated music PC.  But you did ask what would be considered optimal.
 
Asking a general purpose desktop OS to do what is essentially real-time processing with real-time processing constraints is asking a bit much.  A general purpose desktop OS is never going to do that perfectly.  It will hiccup occasionally since it cannot guarantee real-time processing.  The best you can hope for is to make it as easy on the OS as possible by optimizing its environment as much as possible for real-time audio use and to not do any multi-tasking on it while playing audio.

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lessblue said:

I occasionally a drop out when playing back lossless files if I multitask.

Click to expand...

You probably have unnecessary Windows services running in the background. A computer with specs like yours should be able to play 20 uncompressed audio streams all at once without dropouts. This article is pretty old, but the basics still apply:
 
http://www.ethanwiner.com/keyboard3.html
 
--Ethan

Increase the latency in your media player, together w/ its windows process priority? I've got it on 600ms and set the audio rendering thread of my audio player to realtime priority, no drop out w/ ASIO4ALL...even when playing video from the same HDD simultaneously.
 
As Ethan just said, I don't have any useless background process..less than 20 in the task manager to be exact.

Increasing the process priority of your media player isn't necessarily a good idea.  When you increase the priority of a process you increase the priority for every thread in that process.  A media player should have multiple threads.  The programmer gets to select a priority for each thread they create.  Some threads that do background type things or UI things may be set to have a low priority while threads that do audio processing may be set to a high priority.  If the developers did their job right they'd have been careful about what priority levels they set for each of their threads.  If you come along and bump every thread in that process up to realtime priority suddenly those low importance threads for housekeeping chores are now running at realtime priority and fighting for scheduling with the more important audio processing threads in that process.  It is possible to do more harm than good when bumping the process priority like that.

Very nice article, Ethan.  Thanks.
 
Quote:

ethanwiner said:

Quote:

lessblue said:

I occasionally a drop out when playing back lossless files if I multitask.

Click to expand...

You probably have unnecessary Windows services running in the background. A computer with specs like yours should be able to play 20 uncompressed audio streams all at once without dropouts. This article is pretty old, but the basics still apply:
 
http://www.ethanwiner.com/keyboard3.html
 
--Ethan

Click to expand...

 

 

ham sandwich said:

Increasing the process priority of your media player isn't necessarily a good idea.  When you increase the priority of a process you increase the priority for every thread in that process. 

Click to expand...

 
What works for me is setting all the background processes to low priority on single cores, my media players to high priority on all the cores and their "playback thread priority" to realtime. Not a single glitch ever, and snappy as hell. YMMV

This is all great advice thank you.
 
I would even consider building a separate PC for audio playback as Ham Sandwich suggested although I wish I could manage one without the need to connect a monitor to browse, a homemade Logitech Squeezbox for lossless playback.
 
I did look at my processes, I don't have a ton running (I think). Firefox of needs to be closed and reopened. I've been using Songbird for playback this year but will probably revert back to using Foobar. Songbird is nice but has limited options and I don't ever use the included browser:
 

Very good read, thank you for sharing the link, it is now bookmarked.
 
Quote:

ethanwiner said:

Quote:

lessblue said:

I occasionally a drop out when playing back lossless files if I multitask.

Click to expand...

You probably have unnecessary Windows services running in the background. A computer with specs like yours should be able to play 20 uncompressed audio streams all at once without dropouts. This article is pretty old, but the basics still apply:
 
http://www.ethanwiner.com/keyboard3.html
 
--Ethan

Click to expand...

Before you go through all that trouble: Are you using a co-processing sound-card (like a Creative X-Fi?). That moves most of the work to the card itself, and so there should be no problems from high CPU load unless the processor actually cannot move the memory chunks.

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jerrylove said:

Before you go through all that trouble: Are you using a co-processing sound-card (like a Creative X-Fi?). That moves most of the work to the card itself, and so there should be no problems from high CPU load unless the processor actually cannot move the memory chunks.

Click to expand...

I'm using an EMU 0404 USB as my soundcard. I remember going that route after reading it was much better for audio playback years back, say over an add-on soundcard. Of course add-on soundcards have gotten much better since then. I still have my Chaintech AV710 card lying around from back then. The above route was gleaned from visiting Head-Fi years ago I realize.

 
Quote:

leeperry said:

What works for me is setting all the background processes to low priority on single cores, my media players to high priority on all the cores and their "playback thread priority" to realtime. Not a single glitch ever, and snappy as hell. YMMV

Click to expand...

Yeah, it's a YMMV and TANSTAAFL kind of thing.
I just mentioned that so folks wouldn't jump right in and bump everything that looks important to realtime priority without understanding that there's some gottchas and caveats in doing that.

Quote:

lessblue said:

I would even consider building a separate PC for audio playback as Ham Sandwich suggested although I wish I could manage one without the need to connect a monitor to browse, a homemade Logitech Squeezbox for lossless playback.

Click to expand...

Set it up so it starts up then automatically logs in.  Use VNC software to control it from another computer, or RDP [faster] if you use windows (or install software on linux to use RDP).  You could look for linux distros that are simple and stripped down for this use, (a simple MP3 player or media center like interface, geared for music) and build an audio PC with a small built in incase monitor to assist in navigation (like some home theater PC cases have).

Probably not a HDD, background tasks, priority ... problem. (and I wouldn't recommend to change services or priorities unless you know exactly what you're doing to your system)
 
Instead, try out DPC Latency Checker. Your audio is streamed over USB to your emu, low DPC latency is crucial. 
 
(Has nothing to do with playback latency or buffers, which can be quite big for playback.)